Stop Antisemitism

[Sixties Fan]

The family called 911, saying they were locked in a room with four children, and that a man had broken into their home, which had mezuzahs on all the doors. But a few minutes later, the family placed a second call to 911 to say the suspect was threatening to kill them because they were Israeli.

Although the family is Jewish, it is not clear they were Israeli. But one is usually equated with the other when it comes to antisemitism. Antisemitism in the United States — already at a record high — has skyrocketed since the start of the October 7 war against Israel by Hamas. According to a report released Tuesday by the New York-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL), at least 312 antisemitic incidents were reported between October 7 and October 23, a jump of nearly 400 percent over the same period in 2022.


(full article online)

5 AM Los Angeles: Perp Breaks Into Jewish Family’s Home, Yelling ‘Free Palestine’

LA Mayor Karen Bass: "This is one of the worst fears of Jewish families across our country – hatred spilling across the threshold, destroying the sense of safety and sanctuary in a home,"

www.jewishpress.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ Attaching Nazi symbols to Israel, to Jews, by Nazis ]

Signs showing a Star of David in the trash are commonplace at pro-Palestinian protests. They’re a new iteration of a similar anti-Nazi sign. Courtesy of Getty (swastika); ADL (Star of David)

Photos of pro-Palestinian protesters holding signs with a Star of David in a trash can and the words, “Keep the world clean,” are becoming commonplace at rallies and on social media.

The images, often crudely drawn on handmade posters, seem organic. But “it appears that Hamas has been using some type of this image for at least 10 years,” according to Mark Pitcavage, senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. The image has taken on a new life since Hamas carried out the Oct. 7 terror attacks in Israel, triggering Israel’s retaliatory strikes on Gaza and the deadly war that is in its third week.

Online searches easily turn up many instances of the anti-Israel signs and slogans at pro-Palestinian protests in places from Sarajevo and Madrid to Missouri and Idaho.

The most widely shared instance was a photo of a young Norwegian woman, Marie Andersen, who made headlines holding the trash can sign with the Star of David, smiling and exultant, during a pro-Palestinian protest in Warsaw, where she is a medical student. Poland’s president, deputy foreign minister and Warsaw’s mayor all condemned the display as a violation of anti-hate laws.

Andersen defended the sign in an interview on Norwegian TV, saying that it showed “how dirty I think the Israeli government is, both in this warfare, but also by running an apartheid state for decades.” She added that the poster was “not aimed at Jews” and that she was sorry the sign had “undermined the pro-Palestinian movement.”



On Wednesday, another image went viral of a protester holding a similar sign near New York University in Manhattan. The New York Post reported that the sign-bearer was a public high school student whose teacher brought her class to the demonstration. NYU said it did not know who was at the protest.

A long history of putting ideology in the trash​

Pitcavage cited a 2013 online description of a cartoon from a Gaza student union in which a stick figure, depicted in the colors of the Palestinian flag, is shown dropping the Star of David into the garbage with the slogan “Keep the world clean” in Arabic. Hamas has apparently been using the logo “for some time,” he said, adding that he can’t rule out that the decade-old instance “wasn’t borrowed from some other, even earlier source.”

Certainly the concept of putting an ideology you don’t like in the garbage didn’t start with Hamas. Anti-fascist and anti-communist campaigns have used stick figures putting swastikas or hammers-and-sickles in trash cans for decades. You can still buy T-shirts and download clip art of those images from many websites.

“The idea of throwing a symbol in the trash has a long history,” said Pitcavage. “The modern versions of this trope began many years ago after ‘do not litter’ signs and placards featuring a generic/abstracted person dropping a piece of trash into a trash bin became commonly used.”

Pitcavage said the “first ideological version of this symbol was a left-wing symbol that took the common no-littering symbol and replaced the piece of trash with a swastika.” Far-right activists took that image and replaced the swastika with a hammer-and-sickle or a Star of David, he said.


“Over time, many other people created yet more variations of the basic theme, featuring the generic person dumping other things the creators didn’t like into the trash, including ‘USA,’ the Christian cross, other religious symbols, company logos, etc.,” he added.

Going back to World War II, the National Archives in Britain even show a cartoon of Hitler in a trash can. That image was part of a campaign to support the war effort by recycling metal and paper rather than throwing them away.

“Once someone comes up with a variation for something like this, it can be quickly copied and shared,” Pitcavage said.

Signs showing a Star of David in a trash can are suddenly everywhere. Hamas used the image 10 years ago

Signs showing a Star of David in the trash are commonplace now at pro-Palestinian protests. But the signs showed up a decade ago from Hamas.

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Signs showing a Star of David in a trash can are suddenly everywhere. Hamas used the image 10 years ago

Signs showing a Star of David in the trash are commonplace now at pro-Palestinian protests. But the signs showed up a decade ago from Hamas.

forward.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ The sick cowards of the world. Judeophobia continues ]

A hateful teen threatened a young boy with a knife and yelled “I will kill you, Jew” in the latest antisemitic attack in the Big Apple, police and law enforcement sources said.

The sickening scene unfolded at a playground at KIPP AMP Middle School and MS 354 Monday evening in Crown Heights, according to the NYPD and the victim’s mother, who said her daughter was also targeted in the attack.

“My kids were shaking, they were crying,” Chaya Sundroy, who came to the US from Israel 10 years ago, said. “They asked why – we didn’t do nothing to him, why they say that, why they want to killed us. They were really, really scared about it.”

Police and sources said the man also screamed “Heil Hitler” at the boy, but Sundroy, who was at the park with her six children, said that was actually directed at her daughter.

During the attack, several people also shouted “Allahu Akbar” in front of the children, according to Sundroy and police sources.

The initial attack occurred shortly after the family arrived at the park around 6 p.m., according to Sundroy.

The mother tried looking for the unknown man who spewed the hatred, but couldn’t find him. Soon after, a group of people showed up and directed another antisemitic comment at her daughter, she said.

One of the suspects flashed a knife during the attack, according to police and the mother.

Hateful teen shouts ‘I will kill you, Jew’ at 9-year-old boy at NYC playground

A hateful creep threatened a young boy with a knife and yelled “I will kill you Jew” in the latest antisemitic attack in the Big Apple, police and law enforcement sources said.

nypost.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

An alleged bigot accused of punching a Jewish woman in the face at a Manhattan subway station was arrested Tuesday and charged with a hate crime, the NYPD said.

Christopher D’Aguiar, 28, allegedly attacked the 29-year-old woman inside the 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue station on Oct. 14 and told her he slugged her because “you are Jewish,” according to police.

The victim suffered minor injuries, cops said.

D’Aguiar was charged with hate crime assault, aggravated harassment, assault and harassment, according to police.

The hate-fueled attack was launched amid a major spike in hate crimes, some violent, across the Big Apple — with nearly 60% of the incidents targeting the Jewish community — as the Israel-Hamas war rages on following the terrorist group’s surprise attack on the Jewish nation.


(full article online)

Bigot who punched Jewish woman in the face on NYC subway arrested, charged with hate crime

When the victim asked why he punched her, he responded because “you are Jewish” and fled on foot.

nypost.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

‘Jews Not Allowed’: Nazi-Style Sign at Istanbul Store Signals Rising Antisemitism in Turkey - Algemeiner.com

A bookshop in Istanbul is displaying a Nazi-like sign over its entrance declaring "Jews Not Allowed" in English and Turkish alongside a crossed out Israeli flag. The antisemitic sign above the Ragmen Sahaf bookstore on Bozdağan Kemeri Street in Turkey's largest city was reported by the local...

www.algemeiner.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

As Harvard president, I am committed to tackling the pernicious antisemitism on our campus

Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, promised to root out antisemitism on campus after weeks of clashes over the Israel-Hamas war.

forward.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ Global terrorism against Jews ]


According to the source, the anonymous threat was that "bombs would blow up in 20 different Jewish schools in the Paris area." The source confirmed that the police and security forces are searching for bombs in these schools, but haven't yet found any evidence of such an explosive device.

"Even though everyone is okay, this event caused panic among parents. We're going through a rough period and the situation in Israel has its effect on us as well," he concluded.

(full article online)

Jewish schools across Paris evacuated due to a bomb threat

A number of Jewish schools across Paris and its suburbs were evacuated Monday morning and afternoon because of

www.jpost.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

A Cornell University student has been arrested and accused of posting threatening statements online about Jewish students at the school, law enforcement officials say.

Patrick Dai, 21, a junior from Pittsford, New York, is charged in a federal criminal complaint with posting threats to kill or injure another using interstate communications, according to a joint announcement from the US Attorney’s office, FBI, New York State police and Cornell University Police.

The menacing messages, posted over the weekend on a forum about fraternities and sororities, alarmed students at the Ivy League school in upstate New York. The anonymous threats came amid a spike of antisemitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric appearing on social media during the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

Dai is scheduled to appear Wednesday in federal court in Syracuse, New York, before a United States Magistrate Judge.

Joel M. Malina, vice president for university relations at Cornell University, says the school was grateful for the quick work of the FBI.

“We remain shocked by and condemn these horrific, antisemitic threats and believe they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” Malina says in a statement. “We know that our campus community will continue to support one another in the days ahead.”

Cornell student to face federal charges for threats against Jewish students

* * *

www.timesofisrael.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

“I got kickback from a lot of people who came in and threatened us,” said Tsadilas, who said he lost 40% of his business over the course of about a week.

Tsadilas is not sure who orchestrated the campaign against the Golden Dolphin, or how organized it was. But then, suddenly on Saturday, business began to boom. It’s been busy ever since.


At lunchtime on Tuesday, a line of about 10 people waited for tables as others debated whether they had time to join it.

“It’s basically Jewish people,” Tsadilas said of the sudden abundance of customers. “I wish my people were like that.”

Through word of mouth and a local radio report, many Long Island Jews heard of the heat Tsadilas had taken for his support of the hostages and Israel, and decided to support him — mostly by having a meal there.

Hamas on Oct. 7 attack killed 1,400 in Israel and abducted more than 220. Israel has responded with air strikes that have killed more than 8,000 Palestinians according to Hamas. Though Israel garnered much sympathy immediately after the attacks, major protests against the Jewish state have since erupted on college campuses and in cities around the world. Many, including the UN General Secretary António Guterres, have called for a ceasefire. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Hamas must first be routed from Gaza.

Tsadilas said he’s heard even from Jews who keep kosher and can’t eat at his non-kosher restaurant, but who wanted to express their appreciation anyway.



(full article online)

The Israeli flags outside his Greek diner prompted a boycott. Then Jewish eaters came to his rescue.

Business had dropped precipitously after the owner posted pictures of the hostages and flew Israeli flags outside his Long Island diner.

forward.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

FBI Director Christopher Wray said Tuesday that antisemitism is reaching “historic levels” in the United States.

“This is a threat that is reaching, in some way, sort of historic levels,” Wray said during a Senate hearing Tuesday. The FBI director said that was in part because “the Jewish community is targeted by terrorists really across the spectrum” including homegrown violent extremists, foreign terrorist organizations, and domestic violent extremists.

“In fact, our statistics would indicate that for a group that represents only about 2.4% of the American public, they account for something like 60% of all religious-based hate crimes,” Wray said of the Jewish American population.

Wray said that the FBI is tackling the rise in antisemitism through a series of law enforcement efforts including joint terrorism task forces, hate crime investigations, and intelligence sharing.

“This is not a time for panic, but it is a time for vigilance,” Wray said addressing public fear over the rise in hate crimes. “We shouldn’t stop conducting our daily lives – going to schools, houses of worship, and so forth – but we should be vigilant.”

“You often hear the expression if you see something, say something – that’s never been more true than now,” Wray said. “And that’s probably partly why the American people are reporting more tips and leads to us, and we’re pursuing those threats and leads as vigorously and responsibly as we can.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/31/politics/fbi-director-antisemitism-wray/index.html

 

[Sixties Fan]

Twenty years ago, upon returning to Israel from a trip to American university campuses as the minister in charge of combating antisemitism, I reported my opinion to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that U.S. colleges had become the beachhead of the battle for the next generation of American Jewry. For the first time, in an atmosphere of growing political opposition to the state of Israel, more and more Jewish students at leading universities—Harvard, Columbia, Rutgers, and others—told me in private conversations that they were afraid to voice their sympathy with the Jewish state, out of concern that doing so would damage their academic success and future careers.

At the time, I was startled and deeply concerned to see such self-censorship—not in the Moscow of my youth, but in the most powerful country in the free world. I was also surprised then that few Jewish organizations felt a responsibility to get involved in the life of students on campuses.

Much has changed since then. Today, practically every serious American Jewish organization runs programs designed to prepare Jewish students for campus life, including giving them the tools to fight against antisemitism, and to strengthen their connection to Jewish identity and Israel while they are there. In addition, Israeli shlichim, or fellows, have been added to strengthen Hillel teams at almost a hundred universities across the country.

Nevertheless, anti-Zionism—the new antisemitism—is a permanent feature of daily life at American colleges. What is more, Israel’s opponents are equipped with new intellectual weapons: postcolonialist and other “critical” theories, wokeness, microaggressions, and various other ways of conveying the simplistic neo-Marxist idea of a permanent struggle between oppressors and oppressed, in which the oppressed are always right and oppressors wrong, and should be silenced and attacked by any means possible. In this narrative, “white colonial” Israel is always the oppressor, while the Palestinians are always oppressed.

There were many efforts over the past two decades to fight the expressions of this pernicious narrative at universities. They included opposition to the constant flow of resolutions supporting BDS and a push to recognize the connection between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. There were ups and downs, successes and failures, but the struggle continued.

Despite these long-standing realities, however, no one was truly prepared for the reaction of leading American universities to the horrific events of Oct. 7, when Hamas sent its jihadi terrorists into Israeli territory to kill some 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and take over 230 more hostage. Just as Israelis were shocked by the failure of our intelligence and political leadership to anticipate and prevent such a catastrophe, American Jews and their allies have been shocked by the failure of university leaders to unequivocally condemn the rape, torture, mutilation, and brutal murder of innocent children, families, and elderly people by an organization that has made no secret of its genocidal intentions against the Jewish people.

Instead of unanimous condemnation, what we have heard from college campuses is the full justification of this pogrom—the worst in modern memory—in statements by campus organizations and in demonstrations celebrating Hamas. According to the worldview that guides these deplorable responses, voiced repeatedly by students and their professors, Israel must be blamed for everything because fighting against the Zionist oppressor is how the worldwide struggle against colonialism begins.

With this, the parallel between these contemporary critical theories and the Marxism-Leninism of my Soviet youth has received new proof. Recall that the major pogroms in Eastern Europe started in 1881, when Tsar Alexander II was killed and his murder blamed on Jews. The organization behind the murder, Narodnaya Volya (the People’s Will), was a predecessor of the Communist Party, with both an extremist wing responsible for the killing and a more moderate wing that spread propaganda to the people. When the awful pogroms started, the latter tried to defend these aggressions by explaining that this was how the social movement of the masses—and with it the worldwide revolution—would begin. They argued that their target was not the Jews per se, but an entire oppressive system, which their movement sought to overthrow in the name of justice and liberation.

The rationalization of today’s Hamas sympathizers on campus are remarkably similar to these. And if the connection seemed largely theoretical before, today it is practical, articulated and even acted upon not by extremists but in the heart of the academy. While Jewish organizations were busy fighting tactical battles against BDS and other localized affronts, we failed to see that terrorism received an intellectual rehabilitation in the most prestigious segments of American society. Consider the words of prominent feminist scholar Judith Butler, who in 2006 proclaimed at the University of California, Berkeley, that “understanding Hamas [and] Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important.”


(full article online)

Never Again Is Now

A call for a mass rally in Washington in support of Jewish students and Israel

www.tabletmag.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Jewish Cemetery in Vienna Targeted With Swastika Daubings, Arson - Algemeiner.com

The Jewish cemetery in Vienna was targeted by unknown attackers on Wednesday morning, with swastikas and the name "Hitler" daubed on its outer walls and a fire lit in the ceremonial hall were funerals are held. Firefighters were called to tackle the blaze, which did not result in any injuries...

www.algemeiner.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

A municipal worker paints over a Star of David daubed on the wall of a building in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. Photo: Reuters/Riccardo Milani
More than 500 people gathered at the iconic Great Synagogue in Paris on Tuesday night to highlight the plight of Israeli hostages held by Hamas terrorists in Gaza and to speak out against rising antisemitism in France.

Speakers at the event included the Israeli Ambassador to France, Jewish leaders and relatives of the hostages.

“We no longer have tears, our eyes are dry, we are emptied, three weeks later. I ask only one thing, that they return,” Ayelet Sela — seven of whose relatives were abducted at Kibbutz Be’eri during the Oct. 7 pogrom — told the assembly.

Daniel Toledano, whose brother was seized during the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival, said that the lack of information about his fate over the last three weeks “was worse than knowing he is dead.”

“We have come to change what we hear from French public opinion,” Toledano added, to a standing ovation. “So stay by our side and help us release all the hostages.”

Tuesday’s event took place as the Jewish community reeled from the latest antisemitic outrage, involving dozens of Stars of David daubed on the outer walls of several buildings in the Paris region.

Some 60 Stars of David were painted on the walls of buildings in the 14th arrondissement of the French capital, as well as in Saint-Ouen, Saint-Denis, Aubervilliers, Vanves and Fontenay-aux-Roses. An interview with one elderly Jewish resident conducted by broadcaster BFMTV went viral on Tuesday after she spoke of her profound fear. “I am crying because I am rediscovering the hatred I knew as a child,” the woman said through tears.


(full article online)

‘We No Longer Have Tears’: Paris Synagogue Hosts Israeli Hostage Families, Highlights Rising Antisemitism - Algemeiner.com

More than 500 people gathered at the iconic Great Synagogue in Paris on Tuesday night to highlight the plight of Israeli hostages held by Hamas terrorists in Gaza and to speak out against rising antisemitism in France. Speakers at the event included the Israeli Ambassador to France, Jewish...

www.algemeiner.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ French people owning up to being Nazis ]

A disturbing video has surfaced on social media platform X, depicting a shocking incident on the Paris metro where commuters shouted antisemitic chants, including "F*** the Jews... Long live Palestine... we are Nazis and proud." The 16-second clip portrays one commuter's disbelief as she captures the group participating in the chant.

(vide video online)

Watch: Paris subway passengers chant 'f*** the Jews, we are Nazis'

Since onset of war following Hamas attack on Israel, French interior minister reports staggering 857 antisemitic incidents, including Stars of David graffiti marking Jews

www.ynetnews.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Following a series of anti-Israel protests on campus—some which have turned violent—and a lack of adequate responses by university administrations, Jewish students are now turning to the U.S. legal system.

“There has been an explosion of antisemitism on college campuses around the country and we had been looking at this issue prior to the massacre on Oct. 7,” said Mark Ressler, the Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP lawyer leading the effort. “We’re going to show that the universities had notice of acts of hatred and bigotry towards Jewish students, that there was pervasive anti-Jewish bigotry on campus, and that administrators and university bureaucrats acted with deliberate indifference.”

Lawsuits focus on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which makes discrimination by race illegal for institutions receiving federal dollars.

Schools the law firm plans to sue in the coming weeks and months include Harvard University, Cornell University, New York University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University.

Harvard recently announced an advisory board to help develop strategies for combating antisemitism, hate speech and even hate crimes on campus. Cornell experienced antisemitic threats targeting the Jewish student center and its kosher dining hall, with the student alleged to have committed the crime arrested on Tuesday.

Jewish students start lawsuits to battle campus antisemitism, hate crimes - JNS.org

The attorney representing the group said the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks “poured a lot of fuel on an already raging fire.”

www.jns.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

This week, on TalkTV, Piers Morgan interviewed Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef about the Israel-Hamas conflict. The Piers Morgan Uncensored interview, which has already received millions of views on YouTube, provides a useful illustration of the misleading view of history many on the Western left have adopted. This history also doubles up as an excuse for Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism.

Youssef started by providing a relatively accurate bit of background. He explained that centuries of European anti-Semitism had forced Jews into ghettos and restricted them to activities like money-lending, which was seen as sinful by the medieval church. Yet Jews not only survived their persecution, they prospered, too. And that only intensified European Christians’ desire to punish them.

Youssef then jumped to the early 20th century, when Europeans’ persecution of Jews reached its historical peak. As the US and the UKrestricted Jewish immigration in the 1930s and 1940s, this forced more and more Jews to migrate from Europe to the Middle East, culminating in the UN-sanctioned formation of the state of Israel in 1948. Thus, the consequences of Europe’s anti-Semitism, of its failure to answer the so-called Jewish question, were foisted on to Arabs and Muslims. It was in this context that Youssef mentioned the Deir Yassin massacre of Palestinian Arabs by Jewish militias on 9 April 1948. He compared this to Hamas’s massacre of Jews in southern Israel last month.

Youssef’s historical sketch conforms to the prevailing narrative of our time. Namely, that the conflicts that have beset the Middle East since the end of the Second World War are the product of decisions made by white Europeans, and imposed on a world filled with passive, innocent ‘indigenous people’. This means that the rampant anti-Semitism in the Middle East is effectively cast as a Western, European creation.

As an Arab and a Muslim, I recognise this story only too well. It is one that I inherited and told myself for a very long time. That was until I could no longer ignore the dishonesty of this account of Arab and Muslim history.

After all, if this tale is close to the truth, why have pro-Hamas protesters around the world been shouting ‘Khaybar Khaybar ya yahud’ – a reference to the seventh-century murder and expulsion of Jewish tribes from the Khaybar oasis in the Arabian Peninsula – rather than something that relates to Deir Yassin? If a massacre and the formation of Israel in 1948 was the catalyst for Muslim anti-Semitism, why did Izz ad-Din al-Qassam – the cleric after whom Hamas names its rockets and murder-brigades – form the anti-Semitic Islamist group, the Black Hand, as early as the 1930s? And why was the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, (considered by both the British and Nazi Germany to be the leader of the Arab world at the time) so keen to bring the Nazi Holocaust to the Middle East?

If you had asked me those questions when I was younger, I would have reeled off a list of grievances about Jewish refugees from Europe infringing on native Arab populations in the 1920s and 1930s. But in recent years, I changed my mind. I looked around at my home city of London, which has been utterly transformed by immigrants like me, and saw the arrogance and hypocrisy of my position.

I was casting Jewish refugees from Europe as villains, while regarding myself as a worthy victim. I was justifying the actions of those who violently rejected Jewish migration into Mandate Palestine during the Holocaust, while considering myself unquestionably entitled to refuge in the West.

This same hypocrisy runs through the ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstrations that have erupted across Europe. These protests, shot through with pro-Hamas sentiments, have made Jewish communities fear for their safety in countries that promised they would never have to again.

The recent protests in the UK consist largely of recent migrants, the descendants of recent migrants and identitarian leftists, all of whom no doubt insist that there should be no restriction on migration from anywhere, for any reason, regardless of the impact on British society. And yet these are the same people who accept, without question, Youseff’s tale of how Jewish migration to the Middle East caused Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism. I wonder if the next time Youseff faces prejudice in his adopted country of the United States, will he be as understanding as he appears to be towards Arab and Muslim racism against Jews?

There is another glaring blindspot in Youseff’s story – namely, the near disappearance of Jewish life everywhere in the Middle East, except in Israel. Indeed, more than half the Jewish population of Israel has arrived there over the past 75 years from the rest of the Middle East. In my own country of birth, Libya, a Jewish presence dating back thousands of years has been utterly erased by anti-Semitism.

The Holocaust forced Europeans to face up to their dark history of anti-Semitism. But the Arab and Muslim world has never had to do the same, despite the uncomfortably close connection between Nazi Germany and the leaders of what later became modern Islamism.

The truth is that Arab and Muslim societies have their own anti-Semitism problem and it is one that they have nurtured and generated themselves. It is undeniable that the hatred of Jews by non-Jews in the Middle East, rooted in a theology and a history that deems Jews inferior to Arabs, long predates the establishment of the Jewish State. And that hatred has only become more intense the more that Jews have survived and thrived, despite their persecution.

Now more than ever, it is imperative that we do not fall for modern, Westernised justifications for the oldest hatred.

Alaa al-Ameri is the pen name of a British-Libyan writer.

Stop blaming the West for the Arab world’s anti-Semitism

Jew hatred in the Middle East long predates the establishment of Israel.

www.spiked-online.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

‘Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitism’ has become an increasingly common refrain in public discourse. Something that was once said largely in fringe political meetings and late-night dorm-room debates is now said in parliament and regularly heard on national news and discussion programmes. Whether or not you agree with that statement, it is undebatable that criticism of Israel is at least a convenient place for anti-Semites to hide.

Many people confidently insist that Donald Trump must be a racist because a tiny number of his supporters are white nationalists. The same people will argue that leaving the EU is a racist enterprise because, as Will Self claimed, ‘every racist and anti-Semite’ voted to leave. Yet this logic is effortlessly suspended when critics of Israel are asked to consider who their fellow travellers might be.

Witness the nonchalance of Jeremy Corbyn and his allies whenever a new photograph or video emerges to illustrate his decades-long support for groups that are not only committed to the destruction of Israel but also, in some cases, the murder of Jews.

What’s more, those who are most vocal about the right to criticise Israel tend to be equally keen to stifle the open discussion of Islamism, labelling such conversations as ‘Islamophobic’.

They must be free, they insist, to criticise and to mobilise against policies of the Israeli government, its military, the settlers, or the notion of Jewish statehood itself, regardless of whether or not their criticism is proportional, consistent or historically accurate.

Yet any effort to pick apart the central working tenets of Islamism – ie, the establishment of pan-national Muslim statehood through violent global revolution against secular Muslims, non-Muslims and especially Jews – is condemned as a danger to the safety of Muslims.

This instinct is not only confined to the Corbynista fringe, either. As can be seen in the report on ‘Islamophobia’ recently produced by the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims. It argued that ‘anti-Islamism is not the same as anti-Muslimism, but the two are intimately connected and both can be considered constitutive parts of Islamophobia’

There is also a deliberate reluctance to accept that Islam has its own distinct history of anti-Semitism, and that this history has always been deeply embedded in the Arab conflict with Israel, whether in its secular or Islamist incarnations. In seeking to protect Muslims using the misnomer of ‘Islamophobia’, we are often protecting the ability of Islamists to mainstream their worldview, including anti-Semitism.

We saw this process at work in March this year, when members of the US Congress attempted to pass a resolution condemning anti-Semitism. The resolution was in reaction to repeated anti-Semitic comments by congresswoman Ilhan Omar. But progressives pushed for it to be broadened to include anti-Muslim bigotry. What’s more, the resolutionseemed to define anti-Semitism as the sole preserve of white nationalists.

This points to an increasingly common trick, by which white-nationalist anti-Semitism is used to distract from Islamist anti-Semitism. Because white nationalists have no more love for Muslims than for Jews, people with Islamist-inspired anti-Semitic views and sympathies can hide among the victims, often with a handy list of ‘intersectional’ identity tags to bolster their credibility.

Given the woke worldview of the modern left, these identity tags are all that is required to mobilise support from non-Muslim leftists, who reliably come to the aid of Muslim anti-Semites with cries of ‘Islamophobia’. Ilhan Omar made comments invoking anti-Semitic tropes of dual loyalty and Jewish money controlling politics, but she was still given cover by her supporters.

The popularisation of the term ‘Islamophobia’ – which started gaining traction in the 1990s, and has now gained official acceptance – is itself part of a strategy to give cover to Islamist political rhetoric. The narrative perfectly suits the interests of both sides. The left is eager to present Islamist extremism (along with every other problem in the world) as the result of Western imperialism, and Islamists, unsurprisingly, are eager to take them up on the offer.

The double standards of the left in this area were also illustrated by a headline earlier this month, warning of a ‘right-wing push’ to silence criticism of Israel on US campuses. The Guardian, which regularly publishes apologetics for campus censorship from the left, seemed unusually concerned about free speech on campus when that speech entailed the criticism of Israel.

Of course, any attempt to censor speech, on or off campus, is wrongheaded and protects no one. Indeed, it is the de facto censorship by the left of critics of Islamism that has allowed Islamists to mainstream their anti-Semitism. But it is noteworthy that many of those who spend so much time supporting the effort to police speech in public life, and who are enthusiastic purveyors of the term ‘Islamophobia’, should have a blind spot on one single area of controversial speech – criticism of Israel.

Criticism of Israel is in itself a perfectly legitimate pursuit. Many people in Israel and Jews across the world criticise Israel all the time. But it has also become one of the key ways in which Islamists get to hide in plain sight, and present themselves as part of the modern left. In turn, this has fuelled the left’s own problem with anti-Semitism, and made the left an increasingly hostile place for Jews.

The answer to all this, of course, is not censorship, but the removal of impediments to free speech – whether legal or de facto. We need to end this curious process by which the discussion of Islamism has been made radioactive but the discussion of Israel is deemed so moral and urgent that it can lead some to give cover to anti-Semites.

Alaa al-Ameri is the penname of a British-Libyan writer.

How the left gives cover to Muslim anti-Semitism

Idiotic leftists have lent Islamists a cloak of victimhood.

www.spiked-online.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 1

Of the posters of kidnapped Israeli children that go up in London, half are torn down in under 48 hours.

Sometimes it's the smaller acts of violence that tell you most about man's inhumanity to man.

That for many there is no such thing as an innocent Jew is a terrible truth I've grown accustomed to.

What defies comprehension is the darkness of the human heart that rejoices in destroying or defacing posters of children whose only crime is to have gone missing.

When I was 12, a schoolfriend asked if I'd show him the residual stump where, not all that long ago, my devil's tail had been. I told him he shouldn't believe all they'd taught him in Sunday School.

But, since he'd introduced the subject, no, I was not a son of Satan and would he please stop using the verb 'to Jew' to mean to cheat or swindle.

My friend wasn't an anti-Semite. What he was expressing was nothing but low-level superstitious ignorance of Jews.

He would not have pulled down a poster of an abducted Jewish child. Even though it was 1954 and he lived on the outskirts of Manchester which had the second largest Jewish community in the United Kingdom, I was the first Jew he'd knowingly met.

Far from hating me, he held me, I thought, in a kind of awe. I would discover later that awe of Jews, a mixed fear and respect for their uncanny, rumoured capabilities, was one source of anti-Semitism.

Feelings of awe can breed a sense of inferiority, resentment and suspicion. And what we don't fully grasp can turn at last to hatred.

Ever since October 7 when Hamas terrorists massacred more than 1,400 Israeli civilians, that hatred has been on display in acts that bear chilling resemblance to Nazi attacks on Jews in the 1940s — Stars of David spray-painted on buildings in Paris, chants of, 'We are Nazis and proud of it' on the Paris Metro, 'gas the Jews' in Sydney and calls to 'kill the Jews' heard on the streets of London, threats to slaughter Jews on campus websites in America, and a heroisation of Hamas which only two days ago called for Israel to be wiped off the map and vowed to repeat the October 7 massacre 'again and again'.

Meanwhile, in a near hallucinogenic repeat of the Russian pogroms of old, a mob of pro-Palestinian protesters storm the airport in the Russian Republic of Dagestan, in the hope of attacking Jewish passengers rumoured to be on a flight from Tel Aviv.

My schoolfriend's belief that Jews once had tails goes back to the early days of Christianity's struggle to come out from under the faith that fathered it. 'Children of the Devil,' was the Gospel of St John's description of the Jews, and the name stuck. In our own time, for example, the black supremacist and leader of the Nation of Islam Louis Farrakhan continues to call Jews 'the children of Satan'.

By the Middle Ages, the Jew's devilishness was understood both figuratively and actually. Not only were Jews believed to have every physical attribute of the devil — tail, horns, cloven feet and repulsive stench, known as the foetor Judaicus — they stood accused of such hellish acts as desecrating the Host, poisoning wells and, most devilishly of all, kidnapping and murdering Gentile children for blood necessary to their religious rituals.

Howard Jacobson offers scalding critique on anti-semitism

HOWARD JACOBSON: Sometimes it's the smaller acts of violence that tell you most about man's inhumanity to man. For many, many there is no such thing as an innocent Jew.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 2

This 'blood libel', as it became known, re-emerged to fuel pogroms in Russia and the Arab World as recently as the last century and, only 13 years ago, a leading Muslim cleric repeated it on a Hamas-run television station in Gaza, describing Jews kneading matzos — or flatbread — with Gentile blood. 'The world should know this,' he said.

After centuries of vilification in theology, art, popular drama and such overtly anti-Semitic tracts as the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion (1903), which pretends to be minutes taken from gatherings of Jewish leaders planning to seize the world's economies and media, it can be no surprise the Jew lodged himself like a bacillus in the Western and then Middle Eastern imagination.

Nothing is more telling about the mental illness we call anti-Semitism than the fact that Jews don't have to be present in person — or indeed anywhere near — for non-Jews to fall sick with it. Consider this: The commercial success first of the playwright Christopher Marlowe's The Jew Of Malta, and then of Shakespeare's The Merchant Of Venice only a few years later in the 1590s, happened at a time when the country was all but empty of Jews and had been since their expulsion 300 years before.

So why, if there was no direct experience of Jews to explain it, was the Elizabethan audience so keen to see plays in which Jews were reviled? Were Jews as much figments as reality? Did they, in other words, answer to a psychological necessity for them to exist?

Given how central to Western culture Jew-hatred has been, it might seem that no psychological explanation for anti-Semitism is necessary. But its persistence doesn't explain its rancour.

Why Jews continue to be hated is an easier question to answer than why Jews continue to be hated as virulently as they are. Freud and his followers put forward many explanations for anti-Semitism's enduring psychological appeal.

It conceals a hatred of monotheism, a lingering longing for paganism, a resistance to the Jewish God's harsh ethical demands, a hatred of the Jew's supposed murder of Christ and, at the same time, a hatred of Christianity itself, a confused fascination with the Jew's 'exoticism' (circumcision?), resentment of the Jew's intellectual arrogance and separatism, a hatred of culture, a hatred of divisive otherness, and of course, a murderous hatred of the father that sometimes manifests as hatred of the mother.

Why any of these irrationalities shouldn't come and go in the course of an average psychotic's ten years on the psychiatrist's couch, is, I think, a fair question.

Roll them all up in a single personality and it still isn't clear why the desire to rid the world of Jews entirely is so compulsive.

Expulsion of the Jews from one country after another, inquisitions, pogroms, the Holocaust itself — isn't that enough? Yet still, today, all over social media and, more alarmingly, in the middle of Western cities, you can hear people calling for the death of Jews. So will the death of every single Jew be enough?

Or will all memory of Jews have to be effaced, like the posters of the kidnapped children?

Howard Jacobson offers scalding critique on anti-semitism

HOWARD JACOBSON: Sometimes it's the smaller acts of violence that tell you most about man's inhumanity to man. For many, many there is no such thing as an innocent Jew.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 3

The something extra that might help explain this never-to-be-satisfied lust for murdering Jews was on show, with shocking unashamedness, in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter carried out by Hamas on October 7.

Of all the convolutions guilt and blame can perform in the name of an ideology, the one you never expect to see is unrestrained delight in an atrocity, praise for the perpetrator, and callous scorn for the victims, as though their victimhood is all the proof of their culpability you need.

'Victim-blaming' we would call this, were the victims not guilty without trial of being Jews.

Ask what it takes for a feminist in London to applaud a rape, or a MeToo revolutionary in New York to dance a jig in celebration of the abduction of a woman and the mutilation of her baby.

The answer is cessation of humanity. On October 7, as pictures of Hamas's depravity went around the world, compassion not only stopped, it went into reverse.

Yes, I know the argument: this had nothing to with people, it was about an illegal State; you can hate Israel and love Jews — a fallacy that's been reiterated countless times by people who claim the freedom to lie irresponsibly about Israel without being called to account as racists.

That pretence has been ripped away in the last weeks.

Within hours of the massacre, the call for still more Jewish blood was heard on university campuses and the streets of America and Europe.

In the excitement of the bloodshed, the distinction between Jew and Israel, hitherto so closely guarded by Israel's most vociferous critics, went up in flames. Now the genie was out of the bottle, who cared? Let's dance!

Here, at last — for anyone for whom anti-Semitism is an insoluble mystery — is the definition they have been waiting for. It chills me to the bone to say this, but anti-Semitism is the passion dead Jews arouse in their killers to kill more.

Not for being too rich, or too strong, or too weak, or too clever, or too arrogant, or too influential, not for being circumcised, or for fathering Christianity, or for controlling the world's media, not even for voting for Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are the Jews detestable.

They are detestable because of the drum beat of communality; they are detestable because there is a history of someone detesting them.

What astonished and dismayed the friends and families of the murdered Jews in southern Israel was that they'd called many Gazans friends, supported them in their struggles and regularly driven some of the more infirm of them to hospitals in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

They lived close to Gaza precisely in the hope of furthering peace and, in the meantime, making the lives of Gazans easier.

This same story was told again and again during the pogroms of Eastern Europe: seeming friends were suddenly swept into the hysteria of destruction and enthusiastically set about murdering Jewish neighbours they'd once loved.

Let the carnival of hate begin and the kindly day-to-day present of actual human relations gives way to animosities learnt long ago and never banished from the human heart.

The question frequently asked of German civilians in the 1940s — how could you stand idly by and do nothing? — seems barely more than a casual enquiry compared to what we must ask today: how can you stand idly by and applaud?

Not that the academic community that led the cheering for the October 7 massacre has been exactly idle when it comes to fomenting anti-Zionist propaganda. At the forefront of every march and every motion to boycott and divest, tireless in its propagation of lies and half-truths, tolerant only of those who tell the tale they tell, British and American universities have, for the past 20 years or more, been making a mockery of the cherished belief that they exist to question and argue.

That a perfect storm of anti-Semitism has been brewing on university campuses is no secret. Many British Jewish school-leavers choose the best university to go to not by academic reputation but how much anti-Zionist abuse they are likely to encounter.

Howard Jacobson offers scalding critique on anti-semitism

HOWARD JACOBSON: Sometimes it's the smaller acts of violence that tell you most about man's inhumanity to man. For many, many there is no such thing as an innocent Jew.

www.dailymail.co.uk